Control of Daily Temptations Linked to Specific Brain Activity

Technology is allowing scientists to learn brain responses associated with reward and self-control, knowledge that some day may help scientists learn why some individuals give in to temptations while others do not.

Researchers believe neural markers may be discovered that can predict whether people succumb to the big chocolate cookie on the counter or go for an extra doughnut.

“Most people have difficulty resisting temptation at least occasionally, even if what tempts them differs,” said psychological scientists Rich Lopez, a doctoral student, and Todd Heatherton, Ph.D., of Dartmouth College, authors on the study.

“The overarching motivation of our work is to understand why some people are more likely to experience this self-regulation failure than others.”

Researchers have discovered that activity in reward areas of the brain — in response to pictures of appetizing food — predicts whether people tend to give in to food cravings and desires in real life; whereas activity in prefrontal areas during taxing self-control tasks — predicts their ability to resist tempting food.

As discussed in the journal Psychological Science, Lopez and colleagues used functional MRI (fMRI) to explore the interplay between activity in prefrontal brain regions associated with self-control (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus) and subcortical areas involved in affect and reward (e.g., nucleus accumbens).

Their objective was to determine whether the interplay between these regions predicts how successful (or unsuccessful) people are in controlling their desires to eat on a daily basis.

The researchers recruited 31 female participants to take part in an initial fMRI scanning session that included two important tasks.

For the first task, the participants were presented with various images, including some of high-calorie foods, like dessert items, fast-food items, and snacks.

The participants were simply asked to indicate whether each image was set indoors or outdoors — the researchers were specifically interested in measuring activity in the nucleus accumbens in response to the food-related images.

For the second task, the participants were asked to press or not press a button based on the specific cues provided with each image, a task designed to gauge self-control ability.

During this task, the researchers measured activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).

The fMRI scanning session was followed by one week of so-called “experience sampling,” in which participants were signaled several times a day on a smartphone and asked to report their food desires and eating behaviors.

Any time participants reported a food desire, they were then asked about the strength of the desire and their resistance to it. If they ultimately gave in to the craving, they were asked to say how much they had eaten.

As expected, participants who had relatively higher activity in the nucleus accumbens in response to the food images tended to experience more intense food desires.

More importantly, they were also more likely to give in to their food cravings and eat the desired food.

The researchers were surprised by how robust this association was:

“Reward-related brain activity, which can be considered an implicit measure, predicted who gave in to temptations to eat, as well as who ate more, above and beyond the desire strength reported by participants in the moment,” said Lopez and Heatherton.

“This could help to explain a previous finding from our lab that people who show this kind of brain activity the most are also the most likely to gain weight over six months.”

But brain activity also predicted who was more likely to be able to resist temptation: Participants who showed relatively higher IFG activity on the self-control task acted on their cravings less often.

When the researchers grouped the participants according to their IFG activity, the data revealed that participants who had high IFG activity were more successful at controlling how much they ate in particularly tempting situations than those who had low IFG activity.

In fact, participants with low IFG activity were about 8.2 times more likely to give in to a food desire than those who had high IFG activity.

“Taken together, the results from the present study provide initial evidence for neural markers of everyday eating behaviors that can identify individuals who are more likely than others to give in to temptations to eat,” the researchers write.

Lopez, Heatherton, and colleagues are currently conducting studies focused on groups of people who are especially prone to self-regulation failure: chronic dieters.

The researchers hypothesize that depleting self-control may heighten reward-related brain activity, effectively “turning up the volume on temptations,” and predicting behaviors like overeating in daily life.

“Failures of self-control contribute to nearly half of all death in the United States each year,” the researchers note. “Our findings and future research may ultimately help people learn ways to resist their temptations.”

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Rick Nauert PhD

Dr. Rick Nauert has over 25 years experience in clinical, administrative and academic healthcare. He is currently an associate professor for Rocky Mountain University of Health Professionals doctoral program in health promotion and wellness. Dr. Nauert began his career as a clinical physical therapist and served as a regional manager for a publicly traded multidisciplinary rehabilitation agency for 12 years. He has masters degrees in health-fitness management and healthcare administration and a doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin focused on health care informatics, health administration, health education and health policy. His research efforts included the area of telehealth with a specialty in disease management.